Effectiveness Evaluation of China's Air Pollution Control Action Plan Using Satellite Aerosol Product

In order to control the air pollution in China, the Chinese government issued an air pollution control action plan in Sep. 2013. The goal of the first phase of the plan is by 2017, the air quality was to improve significantly compared to 2012. In this study, the satellite aerosol product derived from the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) over East China were collected and processed to evaluate the effectiveness of the plan. The results show that the mean aerosol optical depth (AOD) over East China in 2017 has reduced about 23.17% compared to 2012, and the trends of the MODIS AOD during the period from 2010 to 2019 over the domain is −0.012 per year, which indicates that the air pollution plan has been well implemented to achieve the expected goals.